


The Princess in the Tower

by cordelia_gray



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Canon Character of Color, Canonical Character Death, Community: comment_fic, Daydreaming, Ficlet, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-25
Updated: 2010-06-25
Packaged: 2017-10-18 01:28:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/183450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordelia_gray/pseuds/cordelia_gray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For the prompt "Torchwood, Toshiko, when she was a little girl, she'd dreamed of saving the world a lot with her inventions. But also, she'd dreamt of being a princess." Original <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/comment_fic/163388.html?thread=35321660#t35321660/">here</a> at <span class="ljuser ljuser-name_comment_fic"><a href="http://community.livejournal.com/comment_fic/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://community.livejournal.com/comment_fic/"><b>comment_fic</b></a></span>.</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Princess in the Tower

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zortified (james)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/james/gifts).



> For the prompt "Torchwood, Toshiko, when she was a little girl, she'd dreamed of saving the world a lot with her inventions. But also, she'd dreamt of being a princess." Original [here](http://community.livejournal.com/comment_fic/163388.html?thread=35321660#t35321660/) at [](http://community.livejournal.com/comment_fic/profile)[**comment_fic**](http://community.livejournal.com/comment_fic/).

One thing about being dead, or disappeared, or whatever it was – there was plenty of time to think. Nothing else to do, in that dreary, empty room that managed to somehow convey both the Inquisition and Abu Ghraib.

For the first while, all Toshiko did was worry about her mother – why couldn’t they just tell her if she was alive or not? What harm could it do? It’s not like she was ever getting out of there.

She obsessed over every detail of the past year, trying to pinpoint where it had all gone so wrong, how she could have magically fixed everything – caught the bad guys, saved the day, saved her mother.

After some time passed, she tried inventing things in her mind. She was convinced there were all sorts of other applications for the sonic weapon they'd made her build – peaceful, practical things you could do with it. She made a list of all of them. She made a list of every half-finished project she’d been working on at the Ministry, and what it would take to complete them.

That took a couple of months.

As time went on she spent more and more of her time just daydreaming, the way she’d done in school. Even in the gifted program, she already knew most of what they were trying to teach her, and didn’t care about most of the rest of it. So she looked out the window and imagined herself, Toshiko Sato, the youngest ship’s engineer in the Federation, coming up on the fly with a way to boost the engines by another 32%, thus giving the captain just the power he needed to beat the evil aliens and save the day.

Or Princess Toshiko, imprisoned in the tower by an evil ogre, with nothing to do but brush her hair and wear beautiful dresses until the handsome prince swept in to rescue her. Of course, even in her daydreams, she somehow usually managed to figure out how to disable the drawbridge mechanism and save herself before he got there. She liked the idea of the prince regardless.

Daydreams were a much better way to pass the time in prison.

She never quite forgave Jack for not being the prince she’d dreamt of, even though he did rescue her from the tower or dungeon or whatever it was.

He made a pretty good captain, though, and the third or fourth time she came up with some devastatingly clever thing that helped the team save the day from the evil aliens, she realised he had actually made her dreams come true. The best of them, anyway, the ones where she caught bad guys and saved the day. Saved people.

The thing about both engineers and princesses is that they don’t tend to get into the action all that much. They might be in peril a lot, but rarely in actual danger. That’s the hero’s job – the captain, the prince.

The thing about real life is that it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes the captain gets trapped in the tower, the prince doesn’t make it out of the room full of radiation.

Sometimes the engineer has to be the hero.

Sometimes the princess has to save the kingdom, even if she can’t save herself.


End file.
